Non-theism makes our democracy work

Matthew Lowry has it exactly right in his Oct. 16 letter defending the American value of non-theism.

What made the United States of America truly revolutionary was that this was the first nation in the history of the world to establish a constitutional democracy without a government-endorsed, God-based religion.

There is no mention of God anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson's principle of a "wall of separation between Church and State" was codified by James Madison in Article VI: "[N]o religious test shall ever be required as qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Thus, the only two mentions of religion in the Constitution and Bill of Rights are there to make unambiguous that our government shall never be entangled with it.

The leading lights of our new republic were highly educated rationalist freethinkers of the Enlightenment (more deistic than theistic) who understood the inherent danger that if religious factionalism were ever to take root in our system of government, in Jefferson's words, "the cloud of barbarism and despotism" would descend upon us, and the great American experiment in liberty would be no more.

The emergent problem today in this country is a rabidly aggressive Anti-Enlightenment movement of undereducated irrationalists and pseudo-patriots, who, I am sorry to say, have been brainwashed by religion and ideology and manipulated into angry, intolerant mobs waiting to be assigned their pitchforks.

They have been told they are superior and that they have a monopoly on the truth - and they question nothing they are told. Whereas the non-theist questions everything ... and learns.

Thorn Randall

Libertyville